UCLA

My dissertation focuses on how presidents allocate discretionary funds to localities. I study national leaders who often face a dilemma about how to allocate limited distributional resources to their greatest political advantage. I argue that the president's resource allocation strategy depends on the level of decentralization in a country. Presidents wish to allocate resources to their supporters in the electorate, and in centralized countries, they can do so directly, without any interference from local politicians. In decentralized countries, however, presidents must rely on local politicians as brokers, intermediaries between themselves and voters. Accordingly, presidents target localities with co-partisan mayors, even if most voters in the municipality did not support the president in the last election in decentralized settings. By analyzing 12 years of spending data in 100,000 municipalities, I show that presidents indeed allocate more to municipalities with presidential core voters in centralized Argentina and Venezuela, but mostly deliver resources to municipalities with local allies in decentralized Brazil and Mexico. I also show that local politicians have more influence among voters in decentralized countries, and much less so in centralized cases. Using survey experiments and electoral observation data from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, I show that a co-partisan mayor helps the president's approval and vote share in decentralized, but not in centralized systems. By increasing the power of local politicians, decentralization creates an incentive for the president to support co-partisan mayors. In centralized countries, mayors are neither a threat nor an aid to presidential electoral prospects. By shaping presidential incentives, the degree of centralization affects short-term resource allocation and long-term efforts at party-building. These results help us to understand why in Venezuela and in Argentina presidents were able to deliver targetable goods to their voters in a higher pace than Brazil and Mexico presidents.